While Fleeing the Apocolypse, Be Sure to Visit the Gift Shop

I was sitting in a hotel conference room on Jekyll Island Monday. Behind me on the mainland, the port of Brunswick was on fire due to a problem at one of the chemical plants. In front of me, the Atlantic was pushing a storm surge as a hurricane built up a few days off coast. Everyone’s phones at the conference were sending off emergency alerts, which could not be turned off. Men from the state cyber security office and the federal department of homeland security were there to tell us why libraries are now targets for Domestic Violence Extremists. Librarians spoke in hushed tones to each other about how worried we were that someone might get shot in line to vote this week. There was a full blood moon lunar eclipse, and the winds picked up, the waves crashed, and Stacey Abrams lost the governor’s race. It was hard this week not to feel like I was somehow in a movie about the end of the world.

When I was given the opportunity to travel for work again, I was excited to get back to Glynn County. I’ve written before about my trips to Brunswick and the coast – in fact, nineteen years ago I was at a similar professional conference in Savannah. That conference in 2003 must have been one of the last times I was in the low country before I married the husband. Both of my maternal grandparents are from the region, and not just from there, but descended from the first big wave of European settlers four hundred years ago. Nineteen years ago, I stayed overnight with my Grandma Alice, and she was so pleased to see me in suits giving professional presentations.

I thought about her a lot on this trip, and even made sure to drive through her favorite fast-food restaurant, stop at her grocery store, and even cruise by her old condo on the way out of town. All these things are on the same road and on the way to I-95 anyway. These places were full of meaning to me, but I couldn’t ignore the way things had and had not changed. The roads on Jekyll are completely different, and the beach narrower as the sea rises and storms rip at things in a way, they didn’t twenty years ago. The dollar store next to the Piggly Wiggly looks like so many US retail stores have started to look the last couple of years – half empty, with merchandise just sort of thrown around. The Piggly Wiggly was unchanged in an almost creepy way though, smelling the way it always had, store inventory exactly where it had always been. I considered for a moment buying Diet Dr. Pepper, grandma’s soda of choice, but instead just grabbed the phone cord that hadn’t been available in the dollar store on the way out.

Then I started driving back to Atlanta, which took nearly all day. I made it home around 8pm, and the hurricane – just a small one, category one falling then into a tropical storm – hit before dawn well south of Jacksonville, so hopefully Brunswick and the Georgia islands will be ok. Not that any of this is ok. It’s not ok that Jekyll Island will be much smaller in the next twenty years. It’s not ok that the Torras causeway to Saint Simon’s will have to be rebuilt to avoid the kind of flooding that happened this week. It’s not ok that the chemical plant blew, and that the election was so frightening. Maybe I’m just scared because I’m older now, I don’t know. It’s hard not to look at the everyday unraveling of things like retail stores and see the frayed edges of society. I guess I’m just rattled by all the emergency alerts on phones around us, but we’re not going to be able to fix any of these things unless society changes in some very real ways.

Just over the Glynn County line on the Eulonia interstate exit, which was my Grandpa’s exit the last twenty years of his life, I stopped. Someone had taken an old restaurant, some house paint, and with a small business loan had made something now called “Georgia Peach World”. I stopped because I found this hilarious and because I respect a good hustle. The owners had collected locally made peach flavored things, and because pecans are a bigger crop, half the store was pecan themed as well. If my family had never left the area, I suspect I’d be working at something very much like Peach World, repurposing an abandoned restaurant to sell what I could to tourists riding I-95 down to the end of everything. We might be living some sort of apocalypse, but there’s always someone ready to sell you locally made soap, saltwater taffy, and lemonade with peach juice added in to keep with the theme. It’s 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.